♀Marguerite Broussard

Marguerite Broussard (15 March 1726 – before August 1763) was an Acadian, a daughter of the Broussard dit Beausoleil family, who married Jean Trahan in 1744 and died in the years of war and captivity after the deportation of 1755, before her husband took their children to Louisiana. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), probably through her daughter Anne Trahan (died about 1774).

Marguerite is said to have been born at Port-Royal in 1726, a daughter of Alexandre Broussard and Marguerite Thibodeau. At eighteen she married Jean Trahan of Grand-Pré, most likely at Beaubassin^W, on 26 December 1744. The couple seem to have made their home at Petitcoudiac, in present-day New Brunswick, where their children Madeleine, Germain and Marguerite were born between about 1750 and 1755.

When the British began deporting the Acadians in 1755, the family is said to have escaped the roundup, but by the early 1760s they were prisoners of war in Nova Scotia. Marguerite died before August 1763, when British officials counted the Acadian prisoners at Halifax and listed Jean as a widower with three children. In 1765 he took the children to Louisiana with the party led by her uncle Joseph Broussard^W dit Beausoleil and settled on the Bayou Teche, where he died in 1799 without remarrying. Anne Trahan, who came in the same party as the wife of Charles Guilbeau, was probably a daughter of the couple too.

Notes

Dates and sources

Her birth on 15 March 1726 at Port-Royal, then called Annapolis Royal, comes from an online family tree that cites no record; a Broussard genealogy printed in the Attakapas Gazette in 1971 gives 15 April 1726. Her parentage, her marriage and her death before August 1763 rest on Steven A. Cormier’s history of the Acadians of Louisiana, which finds Jean already a widower, written “widow”, on the Halifax prisoner list of August 1763. The online tree’s death date, 12 August 1763 at Halifax, is the date of that list, not of her death. Cormier places the children’s births “probably” at Petitcoudiac. Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians names Jean Trahan and Marguerite Broussard as the parents of Madeleine, Marguerite and Germain.

Anne’s parentage

No record names Anne Trahan’s parents. She is placed in this family by an argument put forward in 2001 and since taken up by online family trees: Jean’s son Germain stood godfather to Anne’s daughter Emilie in 1774, a Marguerite Trahan was godmother to her son Jean Charles in 1772, and Charles Guilbeau witnessed Germain’s marriage in 1781, as Donald J. Hébert’s Southwest Louisiana Records abstracts those entries. Cormier counts Anne in the 1765 party apart from Jean’s children, as the wife of Charles Guilbeau, and Bona Arsenault lists only Madeleine, Germain and Marguerite as children of the couple. Cormier gives Anne’s age as 26 in 1765, which would place her birth about 1739, before Jean and Marguerite married; the census of 1771 makes her 23, born about 1748, which fits the marriage.